www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/10/30/international1256EDT0534.DTL
Email This Article (10-30) 09:56 PDT VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Human Rights Watch said Saturday it alerted the US military to a cache of hundreds of warheads containing high explosives in Iraq in May 2003, but that officials seemed uninterested and still hadn't secured the site 10 days later. The question became a heated issue in the US presidential campaign afte r Iraqi officials told the UN nuclear watchdog agency that some 377 to ns of high explosives reported missing from another site -- the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad Peter Bouckaert, who heads Human Rights Watch's international emergency t eam, told The Associated Press he was shown two rooms "stacked to the ro of" with surface-to-surface warheads on May 9, 2003, in a warehouse on t he grounds of the 2nd Military College in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. forces at the site, which he said was being looted daily by armed me n Bouckaert said displaced people he was working with in the Baqouba area h ad taken him to the warheads. After photographing the warheads, Bouckaert said he went straight to US officials in Baghdad's Green Zone complex, where he claimed officials a t first didn't seem interested in his information. "They asked mainly about chemical or biological weapons, which we hadn't seen," he said. "I had a pretty hard time getting anyone interested in i t" Bouckaert said he eventually was put in touch with unidentified US offi cials and showed them on a map where the stash was located, also giving them the exact GPS coordinates for the site. But he said he never saw US forces at the site when he returned to the area for daily interviews with refugees, and that the site still was not secured when he finally left the area. "For the next 10 days I continued working near this site and going back r egularly to interview displaced people, and nothing was done to secure t he site," he said. "Looting was taking place by a lot of armed men with Kalashnikovs and roc ket-propelled grenades," Bouckaert said. He said each of the warheads co ntained an estimated 57 pounds of high explosives. "Everyone's focused on Al-Qaqaa, when what was at the military college co uld keep a guerrilla group in business for a long time creating the kind s of bombs that are being used in suicide attacks every day," he said. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that Iraq had reported 377 tons of high explosives missing from al-Qaqaa "due to a lack of sec urity" at the vast site 30 miles south of Baghdad. US Army Maj Austin Pearson said Friday that his team removed 250 tons of plastic explosives and other munitions from al-Qaqaa on April 13, 200 3 But those munitions were not located under UN nuclear agency seal a s the missing high-grade explosives had been, and the Pentagon was unabl e to say definitively that they were part of the missing 377 tons. Bouckaert, who last year criticized US officials for not acting on impo rtant information about mass graves in Iraq, said he estimates there wer e between 500 and 1,000 tons of high explosive warheads at the war colle ge site in Baqouba. The site also included anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines, he said. Car bombs require only about 65 pounds of explosives, meaning that each warhead potentially could have yielded enough material for nine bombs, H uman Rights Watch said.
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